The Book of Fires (19 page)

“He has all her gowns and petticoats still.” Her voice is hoarse.

“Says he does not know what to do with them, but I think he keeps them all for company. I hear the lid of the chest banging shut from time to time, as though he’s been gazing at them in there, taking a look. Full up it is, that chest. Every bit of garment you can imagine, still there. All folded up flat, laid out regular with bits of herbs to keep out moths. A blue quilted petticoat. Stockings, hats, aprons, garters. Very neat, it is.”

“Poor man,” I say. Thick smoke pours up the chimney.

“I offered once I could package it up and take it to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital for charity. Plenty of folks would fall upon those things like they was starving for fabrics, good stuff like that. But he wouldn’t. Just shook his head as though he was only hearing half of what I said.” She shrugs her bowed shoulders. “None of my business, anyway. Got enough to do, no need to chaff away at other people’s matters.” She turns to the table and begins to scrape the bones and gristle from the plates into the stockpot.

Out in the hall Mr. Blacklock puts on his greatcoat and vanishes into the cold street for a good part of what is left of the day. An icy draft blows under the workshop door, and the coals in the stove glow red-hot. And Cornelius Soul, when he comes with his batch of mealpowder, does not seem inclined to leave. He warms his hands, then comes to lean on the bench beside me and fiddles with the tools.

“Saw Blacklock out there on the street,” he says, chuckling. “In a temper, was he? Scarcely raised his hand, though he saw me clear enough! ”

“Perhaps he did not feel like talking,” I say. “Or he was thinking of something else.”

“Bad-humored blood runs through his veins, more like,” he says. “Never knew a man so coiled up by his own ill-temper.”

“He is not a bad man,” I say.

“Irritable, discourteous . . .”

“It is four years today since Mrs. Blacklock died,” I say, to stop him.

“Ah,” he says.

He moves away toward the window to glance out and up the street, as if checking for something.

“How long has it been since you lost your father? You said he
was
a weaver,” I ask. If my plan is to work, I must be interested in everything he has to say.

He looks around. “Oh no, he is not lost,” he says, after a moment. “It is only his pride in his workmanship has deserted him. Down on the dock now, lumping coal. There seemed to be no overlie between the need for ready labor and his long-standing aptitude with warp and weft. He took what he could, and sold up the loom to pay off his overdue rent.”

He stills the tool in his palm, and adds, almost bitterly:

“Priced out by master weavers putting out to garner further income for themselves.”

He scratches at his scalp, at his fine silver hair that must be soft as feathers, and shakes his head. “I do not like it. I do not like the way the wind blows lately so much in the money spinners’ favor.”

He seems to brighten.

“Which is why”—he rubs his merchant’s hands together—“I am going to work the system. Employ what means I will to climb the ladder headed for the pinnacle. And if that means I bend the spine of the law a bit this way, a bit that, as I go, then so be it.”

He picks up my mallet again, and spins it about on the bench.

“You are a good girl,” he says, no longer serious. “You will think badly of me if I go on in this way!”

“It makes no difference how you talk.” I shrug. “And will you leave that mallet! I do not like the order of my tools all jumbled. I like to put out my hand and know what it will fall on, without looking.” I make sure he can see the smile I pretend to hide from him.

“You may be crisp with me,” he says, laughing as he puts the mallet back on its head and out of place on purpose. “But I’ll warn you, sharp Miss Trussel, that my soft heart beats on regardless. While you were at home, weaving your sackcloth with the cluck of chickens all about you, I was out there”—he sweeps a gesture at the window—“marshaling my certainty of freedom.”

I am busy with my task and do not look at him. “Worsted,” I counter. “It was worsted we made, a sturdy cloth.”

And he laughs and bends close to me before he makes his way toward the door. “I hear that you have quite a talent for this pyrotechnia,” he whispers in my ear.

“You heard that? Where? ” I ask him, disconcerted, but he just grins and goes out into the snow.

 

It is dark so early at this time of year. By four o’clock in the afternoon Mr. Blacklock has come back, resuming his place at the bench quite cheerfully, and Joe Thomazin brings in the lighted lamp for us to work by.

Mr. Blacklock is almost jovial tonight, like a man who has been thinking out some bother and has arrived at a solution. He takes a shilling from his waistcoat with his blackened fingers and directs Joe Thomazin to run to the pie shop and back.

“Why should we not eat supper here where we sit, as we are peckish and an immediate sating of appetite is perfectly possible!” he says. He claps his hands together to urge Joe Thomazin faster up the street. The pies Joe Thomazin brings back are hot and full of pork and potatoes. He takes one out to Mary Spurren in the kitchen, and I sit with Mr. Blacklock before the heat of the stove in pleasant silence. The meat juices have bubbled and gone to black sugar at the edge of the crusts. I lick my fingers and consider my good fortune.

“Palatable?” Mr. Blacklock asks, glancing round at me with the glint of a smile in his eye. “The world seems a more congenial place with a hot baker’s pie in one’s hands! They are peppery enough, aren’t they? Not like the bland, buttery rubbish that woman serves up.” He is tall beside me. What can have happened to make him so lively?

“There is something in the work of a chemist called Hales that I find interesting,” he says suddenly, as if reading my mind. “He measured the various airs he gained from the action of acid working on metals; he observed them carefully, though he has not concluded much from his inquiries.”

“What is an air, sir?”

“What Van Helmont would have called a gas is known latterly as
air
, and there are many different kinds. Fixed air, for example, given off when a substance such as charcoal burns.” He pauses, and then takes another bite. “This afternoon at Child’s there was talk of a man from Edinburgh doing significant work in this direction.”

I nod, and do not say a thing. A hopeful warmth that does not come from the stove is flooding through me. And looking up at him while he is talking, unexpectedly I see his neck, the skin beneath his jaw, and see it is firm and smooth above his collar. I realize that his age cannot be more than thirty-five; not as old as I had thought.

How he must miss his wife.

Up in my chamber that night I stare at the candle for quite some time, like someone in a dream. It is a round purple flame that rolls about, gathering itself inside the hot and waxy cavity. It is a little ball of purple flame that leaps up suddenly, like an idea, as it gathers strength and begins to suck the oils up from the wick.

I snuff the candle before I sleep. I am good at this, having had so much practice at it. If you lick your fingers and pinch the flame out quickly, there is no smoke.

M
rs. Nott the laundrywoman has not come again, though she was due, and there is a great pile of crumpled dirty sheets to wash.

“Mrs. Nott is undependable, but so is everyone, I find,” Mary Spurren grumbles, scrubbing at the linen, with her big head nodding. “Time and time again, turns out you can’t put your trust in no one nor nothing. Except for death, that is,” she adds, looking over at Mrs. Blight’s new pamphlet lying on the table. “Wouldn’t catch
me
sitting idle with my feet up on the fender.”

I say nothing.

“Death always turns up in the end,” she goes on. She works up the lather with a grim satisfaction. “No doubt better that we never see it coming.”

“I would like to,” I say. “I would much rather see my fate approaching.”

“Not a chance of that,” she points out. And despite the steamy warmth filling the kitchen I feel a shiver passing over me, as though her words presage something unpleasant.

 

Mrs. Blight does not eat heartily for several days. She has complained all morning of a worm in her tooth, holding her jaw from time to time between rolling the pastry and stoking the fire. “I needs seeing to,” she grumbles.

“Mr. Blacklock will not have a doctor set foot inside the house,” Mary Spurren declares.

“Not even if she pays for it?” I query.

She shakes her head with vehemence. “I know he won’t.”

So Mrs. Blight sends me out to the apothecary to buy some proprietary drops she thinks will stop the ache. I don’t mind—perhaps today will be the day I catch sight of Lettice Talbot.

As I walk I think how Mrs. Blight’s teeth are black and yellow at the edges. I am afraid of their looseness, that one day a tooth will turn up in the soup or under a piece of buttered sea kale; a tough, yellowing lump like a bad nut. Lettice Talbot’s teeth were good and white, I think, pushing open the door. The air filling the apothecary’s shop is pungent with chemicals, herbs, oils of plants and minerals, dried unrecognizable bits of things.

Mr. Jennet is busy standing on a step to dust big glass bottles on a high shelf. He peers through the rounds of his spectacles and grunts, and makes me wait. The shoulders of his frock coat are chalky with powder from his ancient wig.

On the counter I see something in a jar labeled
Liquid Bloom of Roses
. I remember Lettice Talbot’s perfect rosiness and wonder whether this was how she made herself so beautiful. There is some part of me that would like to try it for myself; if only I could make myself a little prettier, Cornelius Soul’s attention might be more keen. I must do all that I can, if I am to make sure that he becomes obliged to marry me. And as Mr. Jennet’s back is turned I pick up a little gallipot and prize up the china lid to see inside.

He will not see, I think, and furtively I press my finger into it. A red paste, the consistency of goose grease, lines the inside. I rub a smear of it onto the skin of my hand above the knuckles; it does not smell at all of roses, but has a cheap fattiness to it. It is not how I imagined. Disappointed, I put the gallipot back upon the counter and try to rub the Bloom of Roses off. It is tacky and persistent; it spreads about until my stained hands look like the butcher boy’s at Saul Pinnington’s. When at last Mr. Jennet climbs stiffly down and turns to serve me, I tuck them into my skirts and put what Mrs. Blight owes to him upon account.

Walking home I feel branded like a strayed sheep marked with ochre, or as though I were sporting evidence of a careless, vulgar murder I had committed somewhere. It takes a great amount of soapy scrubbing to get it off when I am back inside the house, and even then faint dots of scarlet seem to be embedded in my pores like tiny, gory freckles.

 

Mrs. Blight’s temper improves once she has swallowed twenty drops of what I bring, and her conversation becomes rambling and animated for some time.

“My husband was in the business of needles and pins.” She leans on the mixing bowl unsteadily and makes sure I’m listening.

“Three children I bore him. All dead by four or five.” The chicken sizzles on the spit. “By the third death I thought perhaps that is enough of trying now, and then Mr. Blight suffered an apoplectic fit and expired where he stood, so that were a dead loss all round. My father put the blame upon my marrying into unsound blood, and told me Blight by name means blight by nature.” She looks oddly small, her fleshy hands pressed together.

“So I took the imbursement that the Guild had given out as Mr. Blight had overseen the drawing-out of pins and needles for twenty-seven years. He would have gone round the world seven times over should those pins have been laid end to end, but I may have recalled that figure wrongly.” She shakes her head and hiccups sadly. “He had such a terrible fondness for the chocolate house on Lombard Street. Then I had attentions put upon me by a wax-chandler by the name of Thomas Veare, or was it Veasey? By then I was accustomed to putting the shape and shine and victuals back into other persons’ houses, and had no cause to sit about amongst the deadwood of my own effects, knowing what glumness that can bring. He looked abjectly shocked at my refusal, and then a hard smile froze up his face, and he went away. My father said I was a wrong-headed fool, and then the next week, dying himself of a sharp blow to the back of his neck on the way home from trading, he could have no more to say on the subject. On my birthday that were, the eleventh of May.”

“And they say it’s the thirteenth that’s unlucky for some,” Mary Spurren remarks.

“But I’ll not reach my dotage neither,” Mrs. Blight adds. “My plan being to eat so many pies that I die comfortably of being fat.” And she opens her toothy mouth wide and laughs loudly at the ceiling. “Don’t listen to my tales, not without salt, nor common sense of your own.” She glances at the little clock on the mantelpiece above the fire, slides the chicken from the spit with a flourish and lays it to rest on a warm plate. She claps her hands, “Knives, Mary, knives, knives!” Mrs. Blight cuts the bird up neatly until it is an oily pile of cooked meat.

“Life is brief, Agnes Trussel, and I spends it wisely,” she says. I nod and swallow. Why do I feel that already I have squandered mine? The fluttering sound of the clock over the fireplace is like a creature caught in a trap.

But I agree because I have to keep her sweet, I am sure of it. I know that, on a whim, she could cause me damage.

 

 

I return to the workshop to charge rockets in the afternoon, and find that Mr. Blacklock has been making something while I was gone. He is not in the room, nor is Joe Thomazin. But there is a mess of spilt powder and chemicals left over the bench, as though something in the center of all the activity had been snatched away when it was done. I am put in mind of the ring of feathers about the place of a killing by a hawk: a perfect circle of plucked, blooded quills and under-feathers and plumage. What was he doing?